Part 25

The tall mast stood high, the great sail lay in folds along the roof, ready. Under the roof, the lantern swayed, the people slept and stretched. Probably they would not sail till midnight. Then down the lake to Tlapaltepec, with its reeds at the end of the lake, and its dead, dead plaza, its dead dry houses of black adobe, its ruined streets, its strange, buried silence, like Pompeii.

Kate knew it. So strange and deathlike, it frightened her, and mystified her.

But to-day! To-day she would not loiter by the shore all morning. She must go to Jamiltepec in a motor-boat, to see Ramón. To talk to him even about marrying Cipriano.

Ah, how could she marry Cipriano, and give her body to this death? Take the weight of this darkness on her breast, the heaviness of this strange gloom. Die before dying, and pass away whilst still beneath the sun?

Ah no! Better to escape to the white men’s lands.

But she went to arrange with Alonso for the motor-boat.

CHAP: XVII. FOURTH HYMN AND THE BISHOP.

The President of the Republic, as a new broom, had been sweeping perhaps a little too clean for the common liking, so there was a “rebellion.” It was not a very large one. But it meant, of course, banditry, robbery, and cowed villages.

Ramón was determined to keep free from the taint of politics. But already the Church, and with the Church, the Knights of Cortes and a certain “black” faction, was preparing against him. The priests began to denounce him from the pulpits--but not very loudly--as an ambitious Anti-Christ. With Cipriano beside him, however, and with Cipriano the army of the west, he had not much to fear.

But it was possible Cipriano would have to march away in defence of the government.

“Above all things,” said Ramón, “I don’t want to acquire a political smell. I don’t want to be pushed in the direction of any party. Unless I can stand uncontaminated, I had better abandon everything. But the Church will push me over to the socialists--and the socialists will betray me on the first opportunity. It is not myself. It is the new spirit. The surest way to kill it--and it can be killed, like any other living thing--is to get it connected with any political party.”

“Why don’t you see the Bishop?” said Cipriano. “I will see him too. Am I to be chief of the division in the west, for nothing?”

“Yes,” said Ramón slowly. “I will see Jimenez. I have thought of it. Yes, I intend to use every means in my power.--Montes will stand for us, because he hates the Church and hates any hint of dictation from outside. He sees the possibility of a ‘national’ church. Though myself, I don’t care about national churches. Only one has to speak the language of one’s own people. You know the priests are forbidding the people to read the Hymns?”

“What does that matter?” said Cipriano. “These people are nothing if not perverse, nowadays. They will read them all the more.”

“Maybe!--I shall take no notice. I’ll let my new legend, as they call it, grow while the earth is moist. But we have to keep our eye very close on all the little bunches of ‘interests’.”

“Ramón!” said Cipriano. “If you can turn Mexico entirely into a Quetzalcoatl country, what then?”

“I shall be First Man of Quetzalcoatl--I know no more.”

“You won’t trouble about the rest of the world?”

Ramón smiled. Already he saw in Cipriano’s eye the gleam of a Holy War.

“I would like,” he said smiling, “to be one of the Initiates of the Earth. One of the Initiators. Every country its own Saviour, Cipriano: or every people its own Saviour. And the First Men of every people, forming a Natural Aristocracy of the World. One must have aristocrats, that we know. But natural ones, not artificial. And in some way the world must be organically united: the world of man. But in the concrete, not in the abstract. Leagues and Covenants and International Programmes. Ah! Cipriano! it’s like an international pestilence. The leaves of one great tree can’t hang on the boughs of another great tree. The races of the earth are like trees, in the end they neither mix nor mingle. They stand out of each other’s way, like trees. Or else they crowd on one another, and their roots grapple, and it is the fight to the death.--Only from the flowers there is commingling. And the flowers of every race are the natural aristocrats of that race. And the spirit of the world can fly from flower to flower, like a humming bird, and slowly fertilise the great trees in their blossoms. Only the Natural Aristocrats can rise above their nation; and even then they do not rise beyond their race. Only the Natural Aristocrats of the World can be international, or cosmopolitan, or cosmic. It has always been so. The peoples are no more capable of it, than the leaves of the mango tree are capable of attaching themselves to the pine.--So if I want Mexicans to learn the name of Quetzalcoatl, it is because I want them to speak with the tongues of their own blood. I wish the Teutonic world would once more think in terms of Thor and Wotan, and the tree Igdrasil. And I wish the Druidic world would see, honestly, that in the mistletoe is their mystery, and that they themselves are the Tuatha De Danaan, alive, but submerged. And a new Hermes should come back to the Mediterranean, and a new Ashtaroth to Tunis; and Mithras again to Persia, and Brahma unbroken to India, and the oldest of dragons to China. Then I, Cipriano, I, First Man of Quetzalcoatl, with you, First Man of Huitzilopochtli, and perhaps your wife, First Woman of Itzpapalotl, could we not meet, with sure souls, the other great aristocrats of the world, the First Man of Wotan and the First Woman of Freya, First Lord of Hermes, and the Lady of Astarte, the Best-Born of Brahma, and the Son of the Greatest Dragon? I tell you, Cipriano, then the earth might rejoice, when the First Lords of the West met the First Lords of South and East, in the Valley of the Soul. Ah, the earth has Valleys of the Soul, that are not cities of commerce and industry. And the mystery is one mystery, but men must see it differently. The hibiscus and the thistle and the gentian all flower on the Tree of Life, but in the world they are far apart; and must be. And I am hibiscus and you are a yucca flower, and your Caterina is a wild daffodil, and my Carlota is a white pansy. Only four of us, yet we make a curious bunch. So it is. The men and women of the earth are not manufactured goods, to be interchangeable. But the Tree of Life is one tree, as we know when our souls open in the last blossoming. We can’t change ourselves, and we don’t want to. But when our souls open out in the final blossoming, then as blossoms we share one mystery with all blossoms, beyond the knowledge of any leaves and stems and roots: something transcendent.

“But it doesn’t matter. At the present time I have to fight my way in Mexico, and you have to fight yours. So let us go and do it.”

He went away to his workshops and his men who were labouring under his directions, while Cipriano sat down to his correspondence, and his military planning. They were both interrupted by the thudding of a motor-boat entering the little bay. It was Kate, escorted by the black-scarved Juana.

Ramón, in his white clothes with the blue-and-black figured sash, and the big hat with the turquoise-inlaid Eye of Quetzalcoatl, went down to meet her. She was in white, too, with a green hat and the shawl of pale yellow silk.

“I was so glad to come again,” she said, holding out her hand to him. “Jamiltepec has become a sort of Mecca to me, my inside yearns for it.”

“Then why don’t you come oftener? I wish you would come.”

“I am afraid of intruding.”

“No! You could help if you would.”

“Oh!” she said. “I am so frightened, and so sceptical of big undertakings. I think it is because, at the very bottom of me, I dislike the masses of people--anywhere. I’m afraid I rather despise people; I don’t want them to touch me, and I don’t want to touch them.--So how could I pretend to join any--any--any sort of Salvation Army?--which is a horrid way of putting it.”

Don Ramón laughed.

“I do myself,” he said. “I detest and despise masses of people. But these are my own people.”

“I, ever since I was a child, since I can remember.--They say of me, when I was a little girl of four, and my parents were having a big dinner party, they had the nurse bring me in to say good-night to all the people they had there dressed up and eating and drinking. And I suppose they all said nice things to me, as they do. I only answered: _You are all monkeys!_ It was a great success!--But I felt it even as a child, and I feel it now. People are all monkeys to me, performing in different ways.”

“Even the people nearest you?”

Kate hesitated. Then she confessed, rather unwillingly:

“Yes! I’m afraid so. Both my husbands--even Joachim--they seemed, somehow, so _obstinate_ in their little stupidities--rather like monkeys. I felt a terrible revulsion from Joachim when he was dead. I thought: What peaked monkey is that, that I have been losing my blood about.--Do you think it’s rather awful?”

“I do! But then I think we _all_ feel like that, at moments. Or we would if we dared. It’s only one of our moments.”

“Sometimes,” said she, “I think that is my _permanent_ feeling towards people. I like the world, the sky and the earth and the greater mystery beyond. But people--yes, they are all monkeys to me.”

He could see that, at the bottom of her soul, it was true.

“Puras monas!” he said to himself in Spanish. “Y lo que hacen, puras monerias.”

“Pure monkeys! And the things they do, sheer monkeydom!” Then he added: “Yet you have children!”

“Yes! Yes!” she said, struggling with herself. “My first husband’s children.”

“And they?--_monas y no mas?_”

“No!” she said, frowning and looking angry with herself. “Only partly.”

“It is bad,” he said, shaking his head. “But then!” he added.--“What are my own children to me, but little monkeys? And their mother--and their mother--Ah, no! Señora Caterina! It is no good. One must be able to disentangle oneself from persons, from people. If I go to a rose-bush, to be intimate with it, it is a nasty thing that hurts me. One must disentangle oneself from persons and personalities, and see people as one sees the trees in the landscape. People in some way _dominate_ you. In some way, humanity dominates your consciousness. So you must hate people and humanity, and you want to escape. But there is only one way of escape: to turn beyond them, to the greater life.”

“But I do!” cried Kate. “I do nothing else. When I was with Joachim absolutely alone in a cottage, doing all the work myself, and knowing nobody at all, just living, and _feeling_ the greater thing all the time; then I was free, I was happy.”

“But he?” said Ramón. “Was he free and happy?”

“He was _really_. But that’s where the monkeyishness comes in. He wouldn’t let himself be content. He insisted on having _people_ and a _cause_, just to torture himself with.”

“Then why didn’t you live in your cottage _quite_ alone, and without him?” he said. “Why do you travel, and see people?”

She was silent, very angry. She knew she could not live quite alone. The vacuity crushed her. She needed a man there, to stop the gap, and to keep her balanced. But even when she had him, in her heart of hearts she despised him, as she despised the dog and the cat. Between herself and humanity there was the bond of subtle, helpless antagonism.

She was naturally quite free-handed and she left people their liberty. Servants would get attached to her, and casual people all liked and admired her. She had a strong life-flow of her own, and a certain assertive _joie de vivre_.

But underneath it all was the unconquerable dislike, almost _disgust_ of people. More than hate, it was disgust. Whoever it was, wherever it was, however it was, after a little while this disgust overcame her. Her mother, her father, her sisters, her first husband, even her children whom she loved, and Joachim, for whom she had felt such passionate love, even these, being near her, filled her with a certain disgust and repulsion after a little while, and she longed to fling them down the great and final oubliette.

But there is no great and final oubliette: or at least, it is never final, until one has flung _oneself_ down.

So it was with Kate. Till she flung herself down the last dark oubliette of death, she would never escape from her deep, her bottomless disgust with human beings. Brief contacts were all right, thrilling even. But close contacts, or long contacts, were short and long revulsions of violent disgust.

She and Ramón had sat down on a bench under the white-flowering oleander of the garden downstairs. His face was impassive and still. In the stillness, with a certain pain and nausea, he realised the state she was in, and realised that his own state, as regards _personal_ people, was the same. Mere _personal_ contact, mere human contact filled him, too, with disgust. Carlota disgusted him. Kate herself disgusted him. Sometimes, Cipriano disgusted him.

But this was because, or when, he met them on a merely human, personal plane. To do so was disaster; it filled him with disgust of them and loathing of himself.

He had to meet them on another plane, where the contact was different; intangible, remote, and without _intimacy_. His soul was concerned elsewhere. So that the quick of him need not be bound to anybody. The quick of a man must turn to God alone: in some way or other.

With Cipriano he was most sure. Cipriano and he, even when they embraced each other with passion, when they met after an absence, embraced in the recognition of each other’s eternal and abiding loneliness; like the Morning Star.

But women would not have this. They wanted intimacy--and intimacy means disgust. Carlota wanted to be eternally and closely identified with Ramón, consequently she hated him and hated everything which she thought drew him away from this eternal close identification with herself. It was just a horror, and he knew it.

Men and women should know that they cannot, absolutely, meet on earth. In the closest kiss, the dearest touch, there is the small gulf which is none the less complete because it is so narrow, so _nearly_ non-existent. They must bow and submit in reverence, to the gulf. Even though I eat the body and drink the blood of Christ, Christ is Christ and I am I, and the gulf is impassable. Though a woman be dearer to a man than his own life, yet he is he and she is she, and the gulf can never close up. Any attempt to close it is a violation, and the crime against the Holy Ghost.

That which we get from the beyond, we get it alone. The final me I am, comes from the farthest off, from the Morning Star. The rest is assembled. All that of me which is assembled from the mighty cosmos can meet and touch all that is assembled in the beloved. But this is never the quick. Never can be.

If we would meet in the quick, we must give up the assembled self, the daily I, and putting off ourselves one after the other, meet unconscious in the Morning Star. Body, soul and spirit can be transfigured into the Morning Star. But without transfiguration we shall never get there. We shall gnash at the leash.

Ramón knew what it was to gnash at his leashes. He had gnashed himself almost to pieces, before he had found the way to pass out in himself, in the quick of himself, to the Quick of all being and existence, which he called the Morning Star, since men must give all things names. To pass in the quick of himself, with transfiguration, to the Morning Star, and there, there alone meet his fellow man.

He knew what it was to fail even now, and to keep on failing. With Carlota he failed absolutely. She claimed him and he restrained himself in resistance. Even his very naked breast, when Carlota was there, was self-conscious and assertively naked. But then that was because she claimed it as her property.

When men meet at the quick of all things, they are neither naked nor clothed; in the transfiguration they are just complete, they are not seen in part. The final perfect strength has also the power of innocence.

Sitting on the seat beside Kate, Ramón was sad with the sense of heaviness and inadequacy. His third Hymn was angry and bitter. Carlota almost embittered his soul. In Mexico, turbulent fellows had caught at his idea and burlesqued it. They had invaded one of the churches of the city, thrown out the sacred images, and hung in their place the grotesque papier-mâché Judas figures which the Mexicans explode at Easter time. This of course made a scandal. And Cipriano, whenever he was away on his own for some time, slipped back into the inevitable Mexican General, fascinated by the opportunity for furthering his own personal ambition and imposing his own personal will. Then came Kate, with this centre of sheer repudiation deep in the middle of her, the will to explode the world.

He felt his spirits sinking again, his limbs going like lead. There is only one thing that a man really wants to do, all his life; and that is, to find his way to his God, his Morning Star, and be alone there. Then afterwards, in the Morning Star, salute his fellow man, and enjoy the woman who has come the long way with him.

But to find the way, far, far along, to the bright Quick of all things, this is difficult, and required all a man’s strength and courage, for himself. If he breaks a trail alone, it is terrible. But if every hand pulls at him, to stay him in the human places; if the hands of love drag at his entrails and the hands of hate seize him by the hair, it becomes almost impossible.

This was how Ramón felt at the moment:--I am attempting the impossible. I had better either go and take my pleasure of life while it lasts, hopeless of the pleasure which is beyond all pleasures. Or else I had better go into the desert and take my way all alone, to the Star where at last I have my wholeness, holiness. The way of the anchorites and the men who went into the wilderness to pray. For surely my soul is craving for her consummation, and I am weary of the thing men call life. Living, I want to depart to where _I am_.

Yet, he said to himself, the woman that was with me in the Morning Star, how glad I should be of her! And the man that was with me there, what a delight his presence would be! Surely the Morning Star is a meeting-ground for us, for the joy!

Sitting side by side on the bench, Ramón and Kate forgot one another, she thinking back on the past, with the long disgust of it all, he thinking on into his future, and trying to revive his heavy spirits.

In the silence, Cipriano came out on to the balcony above, looking around. He almost started as he saw the two figures seated on the bench below, under the white oleander tree, miles apart, worlds apart, in their silence.

Ramón heard the step, and glanced up.

“We are coming up!” he called, rising and looking round at Kate. “Shall we go upstairs? Will you drink something cool, tepache, or squeezed oranges? There is no ice.”

“I would like orange juice and water,” she said.

He called to his servant and gave the order.

Cipriano was in the white pantaloons and blouse, like Ramón. But his sash was scarlet, with black curves, something like the markings on a snake.

“I heard you come. I thought perhaps you had gone away again,” he said, looking at her with a certain black reproachfulness: an odd, hesitating wistfulness of the barbarian, who feels himself at a loss. Then also a certain resentment.

“Not yet,” she said.

Ramón laughed, and flung himself into a chair.

“The Señora Caterina thinks we are all monkeys, but perhaps this particular monkey-show is the most amusing after all,” he said. “So she will see a little more of it.”

Cipriano, a real Indian, was offended in his pride, and the little black _imperial_ on his chin seemed to become portentous.

“That’s _rather_ an unfair way of putting it!” laughed Kate.

The black eyes of Cipriano glanced at her in hostility. He thought she was laughing at him. And so, at the depths of her female soul, she was. She was jeering at him inwardly. Which no man can stand, least of all a dark-skinned man.

“No!” she said. “There’s something else besides that.”

“Ah!” said Ramón. “Take care! A little mercy is a dangerous thing.”

“No! Not mercy!” she said, flushing. “Why are you being horrid to me?”

“Monkeys always end by being horrid to the spectators,” said Ramón.

She looked up at him, and caught the flash of anger in his eyes.

“I came,” she said, “to hear about the Mexican pantheon. I was even given to understand I might be admitted.”

“Ah, that is good!” laughed Ramón. “A rare specimen of the female monkey has been added to the Ramón menagerie! I am sure you would be a good draw. There have been some pretty goddesses, I assure you, in the Aztec pantheon.”

“How horrid!” she said.

“Come! Come!” he cried. “Let us keep to the bedrock of things, Señora mia. We are all monkeys. Monos somos.--Ihr seid alle Affen! Out of the mouths of babes and sucklings was it spoken, as Carlota said. You see that little male monkey, Cipriano. He had the monkey’s idea of marrying you. Say the word. Marriage is a monkey’s game. Say the word. He will let you go when you’ve had enough; and he’s had enough. He is a _general_ and a very great _jefe_. He can make you monkey-queen of monkey-Mexico, if it please you. And what should monkeys do, but amuse themselves! _Vamos! Embobemonos!_ Shall I be priest? _Vamos! Vamos!_”

He rose with sudden volcanic violence, and rushed away.

Cipriano looked at Kate in wonder. She had gone pale.

“What have you been saying to him?” he asked.

“Nothing!” she said, rising. “I’d better go now.”

Juana was collected; and Alonso and Kate set off back down the lake. She sat with a certain obstinate offendedness under the awning of the boat. The sun was terrifically hot, and the water blinded her. She put on black spectacles, in which she looked a monster.

“Mucho calor, Niña! Mucho calor!” Juana was repeating behind her. The criada had evidently imbibed tepache.